If you believe in suffering, you feed it with your attention and keep it in existence. If you resist suffering, try to avoid it, or overcome it and save people from the experience of it, it means you believe in it, and you are keeping it alive with your attention. If you agree with suffering, thinking it is the normal human condition, and resign yourself to it, or even decide to create more of it for yourself (becoming a victim) or for others (becoming a monster), it means you believe in it, and you are keeping it alive with your attention.
To move beyond suffering you must not participate in its reality. Instead, eclipse that polarity and move into the realm of spirit, of the soul, of unity, where suffering is unknown. To do that, you must focus on the experience of Love.
It’s deceptive when people advise you to “just love yourself” and everything will be fine. Our predominant model of living is linear, that is, we visualize projecting or sending love to one another across time or space. So we naturally use that image when thinking about loving our self. But how can we get outside our self to project love back to our self? You cannot be separate from yourself in order to see yourself, or love yourself.
If you can love something, that means you already contain love and the ability to experience it and exercise it. It is fundamental to your identity—in fact the experience of love is your core identity. You can only be yourself and that means if you are love, the only thing you can do is love.
Love is who you are and love is what you do. So, don’t love yourself, just love. Just love, just love, just love. “I am Love, I am Loving.” Don’t try to receive love: Be love. The only time we move into suffering is when we try to receive love, when we try to love other people so they will love us, or when we try to love ourselves by looking at our image through other people’s eyes. Then we lose the connection with the experience of being love and how all we really want is to radiate it, share it, experience it, and feel it in motion. Not being able to do that causes pain.
If you knew who you truly were, you would never stop yourself from doing that! You need to remember this core experience. You need to go into a deep state and feel—sense—the truth about who you really are, then from that place say, “Everything in my world springs from my huge, divine consciousness. There’s nothing else in this world except me, and I am Love, so my whole world is Love. And I will not allow anything that is not this, that does not have this quality of oneness and compassion, to exist in my world, in any of my dimensions. So—the alternative to suffering: the statement “I AM.” And the deep experience of what that entails.
First have the experience of yourself, and second, bring that experience into the body, into the here and now. It must become a full-on feeling state. How do you do that? Center! Bring your awareness inside your skin: Here. What does “here” denote? It denotes the body in space. Then come into the now. Now denotes the body in time. Time and space—put yourself squarely in the intersection of time and space where your physical body exists; bring your attention into alignment with that.
As you do, say, “I am Love; and I am Here, and I am Now. 100%. There’s not one part of me that isn’t Love, not one part of me that isn’t Light. I—the Big Self—am everything.” This is the warrior’s stance—total presence, total conviction, total knowledge, no doubt. So, you are Love, you are Here, you are Now, you are in the body, you have BECOME the body AS the higher superconsciousness.
Next, expand the bubble of your present moment, in terms of space and time. So from the awareness of being the body, next become the aura; “I am everything around me for 3 feet, 5 feet, 10 feet, above and below. I am the luminous egg. I have no skin; my body is open. I am light permeating everywhere. I am a collection of particles of light floating in space; a ball of light.”
If the light seems cloudy or foggy, let it clear until it becomes transparent and glossy, and you simply feel its presence in everything. Continue expanding yourself, gradually including everything in your consciousness until you reach a point where nothing in this world exists outside you. “I am the world; the earth exists inside my consciousness; the peoples of the world live inside me. The solar system lives inside my awareness.” You can go as far as you want, making the universe personal—then you can come back again to your individual, physical self.
Realize that as you increase your awareness of size, which is space—you have also increased the amount of time you have. You have empowered yourself for action, because you have unlimited time and space. And, if you have included other people inside your consciousness, they are being created by the Big You, the Loving You, and are therefore an aspect of you. And they must be embodying a certain thought or facet of your identity. So there is a learning here—that as you look at others and say, “This is me. How is this me? What is the message they bring?” then you know more about your own inner dynamics and the ingenuity of your creativity.
The skin is no boundary. What occurs inside your mind, the thoughts that are seeded to you from the inner self, are also happening in the outer mind, that which we often refer to as the “environment” or your world, your reality. The environment is your outer self. The inner and outer selves always act in unison because they aren’t separate at all. If you start matching up or aligning the occurrences in the “world” with the same thoughts inside your mind, you will feel bigger, more confident and at peace, and more of your Loving Self will be available to the conscious you.
So, to summarize a bit, the key to ending suffering is to be fully present, here and now, as your true Self, including others within you as your Self. If your Self is Love, they are Love. If you are in harmony, they are in harmony. If you are Love, your whole world is Love, if you have merged with your world. If you are loving, the world is loving, the people in your world are loving, loving anything in their world, and if you come near them, they love you. You are “in love” together.
If you are your Self, there is no suffering. And yet there will be people who occur within you who still suffer. Just be with them. Don’t believe them. Think, “I hear you, and I know you are not hearing your Self. I am going to be with you, fully, for even just one moment.” Let them feel your presence, let them merge into it as much as they wish, let them become you, as you become them. Let the experience of being equalize, and your certainty will transfer to them and they will KNOW.
And it won’t be you, the little personality who’s done it; it will be you, the Big Loving Self who has done it, combined the same Self in them. It’s your alignment with and affirmation of what is already so, being communicated to the part of them that knows this is true as well, to that little spark inside them which has never been blown out. That little spark perks up, says, “You are right! That’s what I’ve been waiting for, and now I can come into activation. And I will displace through my own presence all that is not true in this personality.”
As this occurs there is the possibility of instantaneous healing, sudden positive personality changes, and personal transformation. Suffering is forgotten, as though a distant memory, as though the pain may have belonged to someone else.
Copyright by Penney Peirce